Microsoft employee proposes user delete almost all of their registry keys | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft employee proposes user delete almost all of their registry keys

15 pointsajdude9 comments

Hacker news seems to follow redirects to the main site, but here's the original URL: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/micro...

And the archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20240820143915/https://answers.m...

> Hi, I have purchased a Microsoft Project product key that is not working

> 1. Type Registry in the searching box>Registry Editor> select the "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" folder to delete the keys related to your Windows user account.

> 2. Then select the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" and choose to remove it as well.

> 3. Now, restart your computer to see the result.

> 133 people found this reply helpful

No Windows, no problems?

I find it hilarious that, given a Windows problem, Copilot will also give 5 or so possible resolutions. Often there is an easy way to do it from the settings menu but Copilot will tell you how to fix it with Regedit, often correctly.

The "133 people found this reply helpful" though is really pathological.

The Microsoft forum has been so bad for so long that all IT people know to stay away from it. If I happened to be in an elevator with Satya Nadella for 20 seconds, the main thing I’d tell him is that site needs to be deleted due to the amount of reputational damage it’s doing to MS.

In a past life, I was a system administrator for Windows-based computer systems. While I'm not in that world anymore, I do dip my toes into it occasionally to help out acquaintances that still are, and it is both mind-boggling and discouraging how difficult it is to find useful information when troubleshooting a problem with software in Microsoft's ecosystem.

If it's not log messages that are somehow simultaneously overly verbose while lacking any actionable diagnostic information, then it's useless resources like https://answers.microsoft.com that pollute search results with junk, or people in forums trying random things and then describing something as a solution because whatever problem they were having coincidentally stopped at the same time. And when you do actually find a clear solution to your problem, it's a combination of registry settings, commands, and similar that you would have never been able to intuit on your own, and would never generalize to anything else.

I truly feel for this generation of Windows sysadmins. It wasn't always this bad.

The availability of great documentation and good support used to be a strength of Microsoft, but they apparently decided they didn't need that strength.

For my part, I have answers.microsoft.com downranked in my Kagi searching because an overwhelming majority of the time it's either worthless or wrong.

I just block it entirely with uBlacklist. I don't think I have ever received 1 useful piece of information on that entire site.

My reaction reading the instructions was to laugh. I couldn't resist when I read "Now restart your computer to see the result".

Is it possible this was an AI response? Or AI can't be this stupid?

One time I deleted all of them; can't say I regret it.

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